Today, druggists are increasingly required to sell pills in a box having a child-resistant closure intended to prevent children from opening the box. However, usually the pill manufacturer sells the pills to the druggist in a large container, the druggist removing the required amount of pills and putting them in the pill box and closing it with the child-resistant closure. This involves extra work by the druggist and a chance that the druggist will put pills in the box other than prescribed by the physician.
With some pills, this chance is avoided by the pill manufacturer packaging pills in small quantities in containers provided with a child-proof closure and intended for sale without change to the ultimate user. For example, pills of the aspirin or aspirin substitute types are packaged by the manufacturer and via the druggist sold directly to the user.
Such child-resistant packages normally comprise the pill box, this term bing intended to include bottles, etc., and as a separate part, the child-resistant closure, these being two parts which must be handled by the pill manufacturer, involving an undesirable manufacturing expense. The manufacture of the boxes or bottles and closures comprising the two parts is itself expensive.
There are indications that pill manufacturers will be required to prepackage all pills, this including those sold under doctors' prescriptions, so as to eliminate the druggist's practice of transferring pills from the large manufacturer's container to the small pill boxes when filling the prescriptions, and certainly the resulting packages must be child-resistant or so-called child-proof.
However, heretofore there has not been a completely satisfactory pill box that the pill manufacturer can rapidly load and close, to make packages supplied to the druggist for filling prescriptions and sale, and which is child-resistant.